The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott (31 page)

Louisa pressed her eyes closed, hoping that somehow she could also press away the pain in her hips that throbbed as she walked up the hill. She’d never doubted her ability to transcend the physical, to create a new reality in her mind, and she had called on this skill often in recent years as sickness took its toll on her body. She paused, ostensibly to admire the intense crimson of a sugar maple, and caught her breath. Then she set off again, tamping down the pain by remembering why she had made this journey, why she had returned to the town she had hoped to forget.

Just as Joseph had predicted the day the storm ushered the two of them away from the crowded circus and into the abandoned barn, the country did indeed lose its patience with the southern states and went to war. Louisa spent the first year lamenting the fact that she could not fight as a soldier. She was nearly thirty years old by then, a confirmed spinster and still frustrated that her writing was not generating much in the way of income. In 1862, she applied to serve as a nurse and was assigned to a temporary hospital in an old Washington, D.C., hotel, where men were hauled in each day like livestock only half slaughtered. The things she saw—heaps of legs, arms, and fingers, men turned lunatic with fear, a boy no more than fifteen, half his face shot off, still breathing enough to scream all through the night—these images were lodged in her very tissue. If she could live a hundred thousand years more, the details would be just as sharp.

She spent three weeks as a nurse and then she herself became a patient. Little rest and a poor diet had weakened her constitution and she caught typhoid. She lay raving in the infirmary for three days before Bronson came to take her home, and by then the doctors had doused her with enough calomel to replace the sickness with near catatonia. Over time she would learn that the cure was worse than the disease. The tonic made her hair and teeth fall out and seemed to settle in her joints, causing almost constant pain. In recent years during bad spells, she’d spent weeks in bed and looked forward to the relief of death.

But when she was feeling well enough, she did what she had always done—she worked. After the war, she adapted her journals and letters home into a slim volume called
Civil War Hospital Sketches
. Editors and newspapermen began paying attention to her work, and she sold her stories one after another. Bronson and her editor, Mr. Niles, urged her to write a longer story for young girls based on her childhood with her sisters. Louisa didn’t want to do it. Writing about what she saw in the war hospital made her feel like she was really
living
and had finally broken free of the identity that had been thrust upon her all her life: charming authoress spinning moral tales for the young. Louisa had grown up and apart from her old self, but the people closest to her refused to recognize it.

But there was the promise of income, something poverty had taught her never to refuse. So she gave in to her father’s urgings and wrote the blasted thing. The first volume of the story she decided to call
Little Women
sold two thousand copies right away. Louisa wrote the second volume in a hurry and, soon after, went off to vacation in Quebec and Maine hoping to escape the storm. The book seemed to be taking on a life of its own, and Louisa dreaded the attention. When she finally arrived back in Boston she learned she was a wealthy woman. Suddenly she was earning more money in one month than she had over many years. Finally she could do the things she had been dreaming of: pay off the debts, keep her parents comfortable, and send May to art school in France.

But one thing she’d never thought to do was guard her privacy. After all, the details of the
Little Women
story were plucked almost entirely from her own life, and the public knew it. They seemed to believe that purchasing copies of the tale entitled them to investigate their author. Was she really just like Jo? Was she too married to a German professor? Who was the real Laurie and why hadn’t Jo married him in the end? The intrusive letters and articles irritated her, and she contemplated whether the realization of her dream was worth the price. So many years she had struggled to get her work published, to establish herself as a writer of serious fiction, not just tales for young girls. So many years she worried that she was out of her mind to think she would ever know success, and now, suddenly, she had it. But at what cost?

A paper printed the location of Orchard House in Concord, where she lived most of the time with Bronson and Abba. Young girls flocked there to get a look at the real-life Jo—and were quite disappointed to see a plump old lady answer the door. It hadn’t occurred to them that “Jo” would age. Soon Louisa could no longer bear the stricken looks on their faces and began to tell them that Miss Alcott had gone out of town, that she was the maid.

 

 

One particularly busy
September day Louisa escaped through the back door of the house just as she saw a tour of girls coming up the path. She had a few appointments to keep, a few errands to run, and she simply could not be bothered with the nonsense. On the way to the train to Boston, she stopped to post some letters. As the heavy steel door of the letter box swung shut, a realization washed over her that nearly took her breath away: she was going to die.

This wasn’t the first time Louisa had contemplated death. She’d come very close to it a few times, and after years of suffering the bad spells brought on by the calomel, the burden of constant care for her parents, she sometimes thought death would be a great comfort. But what she hadn’t thought about was the fact that when she died, perfect strangers would almost surely swoop down like scavenging birds to pick through her letters and journals and find the answers to the questions she avoided. Every word she had written when she thought no one else but God was listening would now be displayed for public scrutiny and judgment.

It would be easy enough to go back through her journals and remove pages she wanted to keep private. Bronson had taught her from an early age the importance of organizing and dating the written reflections, which he believed to be the permanent record of a mind’s development—like a scientist’s notes. But when she thought of the years and years of letters cast across New England and beyond—to her sisters, to friends in Boston, to acquaintances made in Paris when she traveled there with a tiresome invalid woman who paid richly for her companionship—her chest tightened. There was no way to know how much she had revealed in her correspondence, no way to call it all back. Louisa had a tendency to dash off a letter when her temper flared over some injustice or oversight. Would something she wrote on impulse twenty years ago suddenly reappear?

And then the worst of it flashed in her mind: Joseph Singer. What of their correspondence of so long ago? She remembered that his letters remained in the lining of her trunk, where they had been since the day Anna left for Syracuse. She allowed herself to read them from time to time, to linger over his apologies for concealing his entanglement with Nora, his pleas for a chance to explain. After the night of the play, when Louisa and Joseph came together and broke apart once again, the letters stopped until the news of his father’s death.

Louisa hadn’t spoken to Joseph since the day she left him standing alone at the train station, the day she sent Caroline with her cowardly message explaining that she would not come. He never wrote her again. All these years later her heart wrenched with a fresh pang at the memory of it. It
had
been for the best, of course. She had been determined to maintain her freedom, no matter what the cost. And the cost had been higher than she ever could have anticipated. Even still, she couldn’t imagine her life having turned out any other way than this—she’d had no other choice. This is what she told herself at the time, and this is what she told herself now: the fact satisfied her mind but not her heart.

It was no use questioning her decision now. Life was nearly done, and despite some private sadnesses—never having the chance to write the sort of books she wanted to write, the loneliness of spinsterhood and, unexpectedly, of fame—life had been good to her in many ways. Almost everything she’d wished for, she’d received. It was only in the having that the objects of her wishes transfigured into something different from what she’d expected. But that was no one’s fault.

She could, however, do something to protect her family and Joseph’s from the truth of what had passed between them that summer in Walpole. If Nora was blissfully ignorant then, why should she have to find out now? Louisa knew they had married at Christmas, just a few short weeks after she last saw Joseph in Boston. Margaret’s newsy letter described the clusters of holly that adorned the tables at the wedding feast, unaware that her benign words cut Louisa to the quick. And the children they most certainly had—why should they be given cause to question their father’s fidelity? The prospect of it made her sick to her stomach.

And so she sent him a letter, a stiff, formal inquiry, requesting an appointment at his convenience and offering to travel to Walpole. Many days passed and she did not hear a reply. It occurred to her that he could be dead. He might have been a soldier. If he didn’t meet his end on the battlefield, he could have died a thousand other ways: typhoid, cholera, consumption, or some vague unidentifiable illness that came on without warning and swept him away. So many others she cared about had departed this world in just that way.

But soon his reply arrived. It was only surprise at hearing from her out of the blue, he explained, that had delayed his response. He would receive her, of course, any time she liked, and though he would be willing to come to Boston to save her the trip, might she not like to see Walpole again? They agreed on a date and time. When she was young, Louisa had little patience, and the anticipation of an event like this would have driven her mad. But at forty-eight and looking and feeling much older than those years, she felt that time seemed to move much faster than she did. Soon the date arrived and now she found herself on Joseph’s doorstep.

 

 

Louisa raised her hand
to grasp the brass knocker shaped like a pineapple, that classic New England symbol of welcome, and hesitated. She noticed her reflection in the front window, wondered, had Joseph passed her in the street, whether he would have guessed that she was the ebullient girl he’d walked with through the woods behind his house, the target of his fierce love, anger, and regret. This woman’s shoulders hunched forward, as if the weight of her mere bones strained her muscles to their limit. Beneath her bonnet, a thin froth of hair only partially covered her scalp, though she’d taken pains to arrange it as best she could. The possibility that he wouldn’t recognize her—or worse, that she’d see disappointment or shock on his face—made her want to turn back. Why open this door to the past she’d closed so long ago? Sometimes it was better not to know the ways in which people had changed. Let them stay the same in your mind, preserve them as they were. She could write to him to ask about the letters. There was no need to see each other.

Just as she was turning go, she saw a curtain move in the front window. The oak door creaked open and he was there.

A spasm of laughter escaped her lungs and she was surprised to find herself grinning. How little he had changed! Most of his hair was gone, revealing a high, noble forehead tanned from working outdoors, but his blue eyes seemed all the brighter for it. His shoulders looked as strong as they ever had, but they slumped just a little. He smiled back and they stared at each other, grinning like fools, for a long moment.

Joseph gave his head a shake, seeming to come to his senses, and pressed his lips into a dignified line. “Miss Alcott, welcome. Please come in.”

She could see he wasn’t sure how to address her. The first impulse for both was a familiarity that made little sense in light of the facts—they hadn’t spoken in decades, they’d never had a proper good-bye. But it
felt
right to grin. She could easily imagine grabbing his hand and running down the path toward the river, walking together to see how broad and thick the forsythia had grown. Twenty years fell off her shoulders.

But if he addressed her in this way, propriety dictated she respond in kind. “Thank you, Mr. Singer. It was kind of you to receive me. I hope I’m not disturbing you.” She stepped over the threshold and followed him into a parlor cluttered with the tangibles of family life. A yellowed child’s drawing pressed into a frame hung above a piano with an embroidered bench worn threadbare. A shelf stuffed with books stood in a corner near twin armchairs with calico cushions, a mending basket at the foot of one chair. In the grate, a low fire burned. The last few nights had been chilly. Winter was on its way.

He motioned to the chairs. “Please—sit. Would you like some tea?”

“This chair looks as though it belongs to Mrs. Singer. Perhaps I should sit over there.” She gestured toward the sofa.

“Ah,” he chuckled. “I haven’t had the heart to put that mending basket away, though it hasn’t been touched for a year now. Nora passed on last fall.”

Louisa winced at her clumsiness, then nodded. “I’m sorry to hear it—I hope she did not suffer long.” Though she knew Joseph had married Nora after all, hearing him confirm it felt strange. He lived in Louisa’s memory as a bachelor, as the twenty-three-year-old boy he’d been. She knew it was silly, but she felt surprise hearing that his life had continued to move forward. He had chosen correctly, she thought, glancing around at all the symbols of the family they’d built together.

“She died in her sleep. She was always the first up in the morning, bustling around, stoking up the fire, setting out the cups for tea. One day I woke up first, saw her rolled on her side, so peaceful. The doctor had warned us that her heart was weak, but I never suspected . . . I just thought, ‘Let her sleep. I can manage,’ and got breakfast ready myself. I went in to wake her later but she was long gone.”